Today is Pencil Day. It’s celebrated on March 30 every year to mark the development of this simple yet important writing instrument.
It’s actually quite a story behind the pencil. Although no one knows whether or not it’s true. Things like brushes and styluses and even sticks were used to write for hundreds of years. But the pencil is fairly new. It didn’t come about until the 1500s.
The story is, around 1565, a tree near Keswick, England was uprooted by a big storm. In around the now exposed roots, people found this shiny black stuff. Graphite.
Now there’s no real evidence to prove the story is true, but a graphite mine was established in the area shortly after. People would take a piece of graphite and wrap it in string so they could make marks with it. It looked like lead, so that’s what they called it and local sheep farmers used it to mark their flocks. But other than writing on your sheep, it still wasn’t being used for much.
In the 18th century, a German chemist named it graphite, after the Greek word for “to write”. Then a Swiss naturalist came up with the idea for putting the graphite into a wooden tube, and the pencil was born. At that time, the British and French were always fighting over something, and since the graphite mines were in Britain, there came a time when the French were cut off from graphite supplies. So they came up with the technique of taking low quality graphite and mixing it with clay, shaping it into little rods and baking it. They then stuck those rods into wood and the basic pencil was born.
Since the wood they used wasn’t always of very good quality, someone came up with the idea of painting them. At the 1889 World’s Fair in Paris, a company debut a high quality pencil that was painted yellow. It was a hit. And also why there are so many yellow pencils.
If you made mistakes, people would rub them out with old pieces of bread. Until Joseph Priestly discovered the sap from certain South American trees seemed pretty good at rubbing out pencil marks. So he called the stuff “rubber”. A few years later, in 1858, Hyman Lipman came up with the idea of sticking a little piece of the stuff on the end of a pencil. He applied for a patent on March 30, 1858, which is why pencil day is celebrated today.
I guess really we should be celebrating eraser day, but whatever. They still come in handy and I still use them. I think my cats also use them. I’m not sure what for, but I often see them wandering around with a pencil in their mouth.
With a little work, maybe I can get them to do my taxes.